In order to qualify for the ballot, Connect Bay Area needed to collect 186,000 signatures. That seemed like a daunting task, but the campaign collected 305,000 signatures! Of those, 77,000 were collected by Advocates like us and our partners, saving a ton of money on the paid signature-gathering side of the effort.
The SV@Home Action Fund joined lots of other organizations in enthusiastically endorsing the signature-gathering effort for Connect Bay Area, led by Seamless Bay Area and the Transbay Coalition. We helped collect signatures at several Affordable Housing Month events, and we are proud to have played our part in this strong coalition. Now on to November!
Connect Bay Area is a campaign for a measure on the November 2026 ballot, raising funds to protect transit services like BART, Caltrain, and VTA through a half cent sales tax in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, and Santa Clara Counties and a one cent sales tax in San Francisco. Connect Bay Area includes important accountability and oversight to make sure the public’s money is well managed. If the measure fails, we will see drastic service cuts across the region.
Good transit and good housing options are both essential to an affordable, economically vibrant, healthy, and sustainable urban region. Lots of people who live in affordable housing are dependent on transit. Lots of people who would like to avoid the very high-costs of car-ownership or reduce their carbon footprint can only do so with a strong transit network.
See more from Seamless Bay Area here